Grassroots Social Innovation and the Mobilisation of Values in Collaborative Consumption: a Conceptual Model

Journal of Cleaner Production 134 (2016) 204e213 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro Grassroots social innovation and the mobilisation of values in collaborative consumption: a conceptual model * Chris J. Martin a, , Paul Upham b, c a Department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise, The Open University Business School, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK b The Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK c The Energy Research Institute, School of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK article info abstract Article history: There is growing interest in the potential of grassroots innovations to play a role in the transition to Received 16 December 2014 sustainable production and consumption systems. However, the role of values has been little considered Received in revised form in relation to the development and diffusion of grassroots innovations. We develop a conceptual model 19 March 2015 of how citizens' values are mobilised by grassroots innovations, drawing on the value theory of Schwartz Accepted 18 April 2015 et al. (2012) and the theory of collective enactment of values of Chen et al. (2013). Using the results of a Available online 28 April 2015 large scale survey of free reuse groups (e.g. Freecycle and Freegle), which enable collaborative forms of consumption, we apply the conceptual model to explore how participants' values are mobilised and Keywords: fi Grassroots innovation expressed. We show that while the majority of free reuse group participants do hold signi cantly Reuse stronger self-transcendence (i.e. pro-social) values than the wider UK population, they also hold other Values values in common with that population and a minority actually place less emphasis on self- Transitions transcendence values. We conclude that diffusion of this particular grassroots innovation is unlikely to Social innovation be simply value limited and that structural features may be more significant. Collaborative consumption © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 1. Introduction In terms of the latter, research in the field of socio-technical transitions has tended to focus on the potential of technological It has long been recognised that the systems of production and innovations and the market economy to drive the transition to a consumption in industrialised consumerist societies are unsus- sustainable society (Markard et al., 2012; Smith et al., 2010). tainable (Rockstrom et al., 2009). However, many questions remain However, there is now growing interest in civil society as an over- regarding how and why we are locked into these unsustainable looked site from which ‘grassroots social innovations’ with poten- systems, what a transition to more sustainable systems might look tial to contribute to this transition may emerge (Seyfang and Smith, like and how such a transition might take place (Vergragt et al., 2007). Seyfang and Smith (2007: 585) “use the term ‘grassroots 2014). As populations grow ever more urbanised (The World innovations’ to describe networks of activists and organisations Bank, 2014) the role of cities in both the reproduction of these generating novel bottomeup solutions for sustainable develop- unsustainable systems and the transition to sustainable systems ment; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests grows ever more important (e.g. Bulkeley et al., 2010; Hodson and and values of the communities involved”. To date, grassroots Marvin, 2010). To address the transdisciplinary questions posed, innovation research has focussed on the dynamics of international above, the emerging field of sustainable production and con- and national networks of social economy and civil society actors sumption systems research seeks to integrate perspectives (Vergragt et al., 2014). Such networks of grassroots innovation including social practices, environmental psychology, economics, connect societal experiments, which take the form of community- governance, social movements and socio-technical transitions based initiatives grounded in a specific local context and explore (Vergragt et al., 2014). alternative configurations of urban production and consumption systems (Heiskanen et al., 2015). Studies of grassroots innovation have explored the promises and perils of community energy systems (Hargreaves et al., 2013a), cohousing provision (Boyer, 2014), * Corresponding author. community currencies (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013), local food E-mail address: [email protected] (C.J. Martin). production systems (Kirwan et al., 2013), and democratic http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.04.062 0959-6526/© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). C.J. Martin, P. Upham / Journal of Cleaner Production 134 (2016) 204e213 205 innovation systems (Smith et al., 2014). Such research has tended to delineate between individual (Schwartz, 1992), collective (Chen draw upon models from transitions theory originally developed to et al., 2013) and cultural values (Schwartz, 1999). Consequently, explain the dynamics of technological innovations in the market the literatures that relate to values are substantial, spanning large economy e e.g. niche development theory (Geels and Raven, 2006). areas of social psychology and sociology. A full review is beyond the Hence, it is unsurprising that the central role of values in grassroots scope of this paper and we suggest Hitlin and Piliavin (2004) and innovations has been acknowledged but remains to be explicitly Dietz et al. (2005) as an initial starting point for an overview of the conceptualised. Furthermore, Seyfang and Smith (2007: 599) argue literature. Here, we select and integrate theories of values aligned that “Grassroots initiatives exhibit their own micro-politics and can with our objective of understanding how societal experiments be exclusive to some and inclusive to others. Much work needs to within grassroots innovations respond to and mobilise the values of be done regarding ‘whose’ alternative values are being mobilised in participants. In particular we integrate theory enabling the explo- niches”. ration of the values of participants in a societal experiment, along Here we show how societal experiments e within ‘grassroots with the ways in which collective activities, such as societal ex- innovation’ networks e respond to and mobilise the values of the periments, are shaped by and seek to shape values. citizens involved. We offer a conceptual model of these processes Individual values are usually theorised as mental structures, that spans two scales of analysis: (1) the individual scale e constructs with motivational implications. Schwartz and Bilsky exploring which values are held by people participating in societal (1987: 551) thus identify five core features of values: “According experiments; and (2) the collective scale e at which values are to the literature, values are (a) concepts or beliefs, (b) about mobilised within societal experiments. To develop the conceptual desirable end states or behaviours, (c) that transcend specific sit- model, we draw on theory from social psychology on basic values uations, (d) guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, (Schwartz, 1992, 2006; Schwartz et al., 2012) and sociological and (e) are ordered by relative importance”. Schwartz (1992) has theory on the collective enactment of values (Chen et al., 2013). We developed a prominent theory of individual values, which has been apply, test and discuss the model with a case study of the role of applied in hundreds of research studies (Schwartz et al., 2012). This values in online, free reuse groups such as Freecycle. These groups theory identifies ten basic values (see Table 1) which Schwartz have millions of members across the world (Freecycle, 2014; argues are grounded in universal human requirements for survival Freegle, 2014a) and enable people to freely and directly give un- and existence, including biological needs and the need for social wanted items to others in their local area (rather than sending coordination (Schwartz, 1992). The ten values are theorised to form items to their local authority waste management system). In gen- a circular motivational continuum (see Fig. 1) where the distinction eral, online free reuse groups enable a form of collaborative con- between adjacent values is blurred (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz et al., sumption (Botsman and Rogers, 2011) and hold potential to reduce 2012) and the proximity or distance between a given pair of values consumption and waste in cities by extending product lifetimes. suggests the degree of compatibility or conflict between them. In the next section we outline the core theoretical constructs on Furthermore, each basic value is theorised to be connected to one of which our conceptual model is based. We then present the back- four more abstract values: openness to change, conservation, self- ground to the research, describing how free reuse groups operate transcendence and self-enhancement (see Fig. 1). Two scales for and how they have developed. This is followed by an overview of measuring the importance an individual places on each of the the research methodology, a large scale survey measuring the values

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